Pragmatics of Indirection and Face in Hausa Communication: Toward a Culturally-Grounded Politeness Theory

Politeness theory as developed in Brown and Levinson's universal framework has been extensively critiqued for its Anglo-centric bias and inadequate engagement with the cultural specificity of face and indirection in non-Western communicative traditions. This doctoral study develops a culturally-grounded politeness theory for Hausa communication, making an original contribution to cross-cultural pragmatics by articulating the distinctive cultural logics of face, social hierarchy, and communicative indirection in Hausa interaction. Drawing on pragmatics theory, African philosophy, and Islamic ethics of communication, the research develops a theoretical framework specifically responsive to Hausa cultural values and communicative norms before testing and refining it against extensive empirical data. The empirical programme involves three years of data collection employing multiple complementary methods: corpus-based analysis of 400 naturally occurring interactions spanning domestic, workplace, marketplace, and religious settings; discourse completion task data from 200 Hausa speakers presenting standardised interactional scenarios; metalinguistic interview data from 60 participants on communicative norms and face values; and experimental pragmatic studies testing predictions of competing theoretical accounts. The research compares findings across gender, age, urban-rural, and educational background dimensions to examine variation in politeness norms. Original theoretical contributions include the Hausa Communicative Ethics Framework, which centres Islamic-inflected honour, hierarchical deference, and communal face as primary face orientations distinct from individual positive and negative face in Brown and Levinson's model. Practical implications for cross-cultural communication training are also developed. Keywords: Hausa politeness, Pragmatics, Indirection, Face theory, Cultural communication.